Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5467278" data-attributes="member: 22779">The simple answer would be, because it would be fun.  Introducing complications leads to more game play and makes play more interesting.  Isn't that the goal, pretty much all the time?  Being able to press the "I win" button might be great the first time, but, it does pale after a while.Gaming story.In our current game, the DM ran a SC where we were organizing a group of refugees to fortify a position against an incoming (smallish) army.  During this, a number of bits of sabotage occured, which triggered another, nested, skill challenge - find the sabateur.We realized, after some time, that the sabateur was a doppleganger (the enemy had used them before) and we set about tracking it down.  We actually failed and this resulted in some of our defenses being considerably weakened.My immediete thought, though, was, "Wow, we really aren't playing 3e anymore.  We have a group with two full casters and a paladin.  In 3e, this would take all of 10 seconds to resolve - casters to the rescue, detect evil, dead doppleganger."  Instead, we had an interesting series of events spawned by the complications of our failure.So, taking away the "Succeed on the first try" thing isn't so bad, IMO.And, on that line of thought, I really have to question BryonD's assertiion that a SC actually removes the "Succeed on the first try"  thing.  The whole point of a SC is that you have an event that is complicated enough that there shouldn't be anything you can do to succeed on the first try.  If you could, then it wouldn't be a skill challenge.  It would be a straight up skill check.In other words, I think BryonD is complaining about the removal of an element that never actually existed within the framework.  Because 4e removes most of the "I win" magic abilities from the characters, it becomes a lot easier to create situations where it will take more than a single action to resolve the issue.  No Zone of Truth spells mean that questioning people becomes a lot more problematic.  I see what you're saying.  If the DM is on the ball and decides to call the situation a success or failure based on his own feelings and he's good at that, you have a scene that is going to play out better than a SC.  OTOH, if the DM isn't on the ball, if the DM doesn't have a really great sense of pacing, then you wind up with an awful lot of very unsatisfactory scenes that either get cut short before they get interesting or drag on FAR too long (IMO, the much more likely scenario).It's the classic puzzle room scene.  The DM makes the group jump through hoop after hoop after hoop trying to answer the riddle of the door and whatnot.  Having a mechanical framework that says, "Ok, it's a hard challenge, 6/3" means that pacing is pretty solid. Again, it gets back to the idea that sure, a great DM doesn't need the framework.  Sure, I'll buy that.  But, the rest of us mere mortals sure appreciate having one now that I've seen SC's done right a few times.  And, hey, after you get used to using the framework, you can start experimenting a bit and growing the framework into new and interesting concepts.Instead of expecting every DM to reinvent the wheel.</blockquote>

Verification